The only things that matter are invisible.
-Robert Bresson
The Great Voice Par Excellence of Cinécriture, this Robert Bresson, so one supposes we listen to him, no? When I delivered a seminar thing on Bresson as a grad student, some piddler in the cheap seats [from some whole other postsecondary] asked why some of us gushing novitiates like to take these dead French patriarchs at their convoluted word, quoting them lengthily in a conference context while we're at it, as though the Great Strawman's interpretation of His own work could ever be sounder than anyone else's. He wasn't wrong, this piddler, but I'm no fool, and I certainly had not in the paper I delivered quoted Bresson interpreting the meaning of his own work. Naturally, I had quoted Bresson from interviews and from his absolutely invaluable Notes on the Cinematograph, a book of sequential precepts/meditations undoubtedly informed by an abiding lifelong fellow-feeling for logician, mathematician, and theologian Blaise Pascal, he of the para-immortal Pensées, and as such a book, Bresson's, that could only ever really be a discourse on method—or merely provisional [sk]etchings with that general thrust to them. Descartes isn't the opinions about the Discours de la Méthode. He's the method itself, essentially, right? At least insofar as you or I might act upon a call to works. In the conference context I may also have quipped that, like it or not, one doesn't do academic papers on Hitler neglecting to acknowledge Mein Kampf. I am not one to throw down the indefensible Hitler card unless I can do it with a high degree of novelty.
Bresson himself, in dialogue with Michel Delahaye and Jean-Luc Godard in 1967: "You must leave the spectator free. And at the same time you must make yourself loved by him. You must make him love the way in which you render things. That is to say: show him things in the order and in the way that you love to see them and to feel them; make him feel them, in presenting them to him, as you see them and feel them yourself, and this, while leaving him a great freedom, while making him free."
Keith Reader, author of a relatively worthy book on Bresson, part of the "French Film Directors" series from Manchester University Press, argues that Bresson's 1956 film Un condamné à mort s'est échappé cannot be thought of as a ‘Resistance film’ because “All we know of the activities that have led Fontaine, the protagonist, to be arrested and condemned to death is that he is alleged to have blown up a railway bridge." Okay, again, maybe true...meaningless, really; it can be spun around something near as many ways as some wiseass can spin it. What you are actually reading is Keith Reader doing the tiresome micropolitics of his moment such that he can claim that a film about a French prisoner of war who will stop at nothing to escape the Germans is not a 'Resistance film' because it is not a genre film about insurrectionary bravado and martial array set during the Second World War [this is a bad thing?]. Okay, a man is going to escape. This the film tells us in its French title. Fontaine has been condemned to death, and we really have no cause to imagine the Germans consider him the equivalent of something like a petty criminal. Plus, of course, the movie is about one hundred minutes of one man actively escaping, using all the resources of a sometimes stationary and sometimes animate sensorium, itself intercomplexed with the world around it at levels social, molecular, and more nebulously subliminal, in order to actively escape, which approximates the zenith of resistance for a man in Fontaine's position, at least as far as your humble Weirdbuckle's concerned. Wherever your sectarian bent has you placing your chips upon the felt, my friend, I assure you that a resistance is in process. Part of what bears special note here pertains also to the extraordinary sensorial tension Bresson's film creates and then retains for its duration, a fact testified to by many a contemporaneous or near-contemporaneous commentator of distinction, including Susan Sontag, who also said that Bresson films prior to '62's Procès de Jeanne d'Arc were "dialectical" and that future films by him in colour were "unthinkable," both of these constituting flamboyantly erroneous declarations. My thoughts with respect to why Un condamné à mort s'est échappé is believed by many to be nerve-racking, white-kuckle viewing, or some kind of approximation, has a lot more to do with stuff completely unrelated to knowing who the right bad guys are and the best means to wallop same, but rather sensory-motor responsivity in a shared system, viewer + movie [novelty unto itself!] bound up in the same kind of intensive business, curiously, the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze sees at work in famous whip and fur fanatic Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. What becomes essential is waiting or suspense," writes Deleuze in the essay "Re-Presentation of Masoch," "as a plenitude, as a physical and spiritual intensity." It were almost as though those invisible things we have Bresson telling us at the outset are the only that matter are confirmed by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch by way of Deleuze and perverse means we could not and probably should not have expected [yay!]. Of course, then we have Deleuze doing far more good in a very short passage from Cinema 2: The Time-Image than all the formidable no-damn-good done by Paul Shrader's risible Transcendental Style in Film. As so many before him have, Deleuze cannot help but zero in on the doors/passageways and the disembodied human hands: "The hand, then, takes on a role in the image which goes infinitely beyond the sensory-motor demands of the action, which takes the place of the face itself for the purpose of affects, and which, in the area of perception, becomes the mode of construction of space which is adequate to the decisions of the spirit." Everybody is always going back to Pascal and Jansenism when it comes to Bresson—a broad tendency has him as an ascetic Catholic in a vaunted tradition, which he is and isn't—such that Deleuze's "decisions of the spirit" equates-out to religious faith or its ghost, when what the indefatigably logical Deleuze is actually pinpointing is an invisible site of actions and reactions expressed through cinematic means incorporating a visual focus on the business of hands. Because Bresson's montage or anti-montage [dialogic/poetic montage] so insistently prizes the affectivity of the invisible agent in the dis-unified bodily fragment, and because the intensive relations it establishes are meant to be felt as renderings, the spiritual and the erotic and the emotional, in point of fact, all sort of end up belonging to this territory of "the decisions of the spirit." Decisions are actions and reactions and chain-reactions: a conditional chemistry of the deluged and the effortfully angling [The Book of Genesis].
All those words and gestures you've invented are so insignificant they're humiliating. God doesn't reveal himself through mediocrity.
- Female Parisian student in church forum, as subtitled, in Robert Bresson's Le diable probablement (1976)
Darn near everyone with a basic knowledge of film history and audio-visual grammar will deduce from the experience of a Bresson film that its director is very often focused on the kinds of stuff he usually claims to be focused on, this largely a matter of shot selection and cutting, producing renderings judged successful or wanting on the grounds of a quality of the just so or as I'd experience or would like to experience it. Poetic, associative assembly of carefully selected images and sounds [the latter so calibrated as to employ a style of minimalism almost outlandishly maximalist, this a characteristic shared with the later sound films of Carl Theodor Dreyer, to be sure]. One additional bugbear that is I suppose somewhat amusing to me has to do with those reductive commentators—commencing with oft-pedantic French film critics of the day and persisting in the woeful Academy of ours—who want to separate the early Sontag-dialectical-or-whatever Bresson from the later, earlier "unthinkable," colour Bresson. One thing that can universally be expected here: a line of division drawn between the early Bresson in thrall to Pascal, and a later version of the guy, presumably VERY SPECIFICALLY augmented, who is subsequently in thrall to Fyodor Dostoevsky. People who have made such claims are universally people who have dutifully taken notes in the existentialism lectures in preparation for the existentialism exam. However, for a sensible person of learning, Dostoevsky is just as much "an ascetic Christian in a vaunted tradition" as are Pascal and Bresson, if we wish to pivot things such that that's where we've got them set up. The professor told you Dostoevsky was an existentialist and then provided you the pacifying bullet points as definitive proof. I skipped class that day, and for me Fyodor will always be a brilliant and highly baroque author of fictions as well as a gambling addict, womanizer, rail-thin heavy drinker, sufferer of unthinkable trauma, and lifelong epileptic who one might say complained of holy visions. For a man like Dostoevsky, who was used to sitting real still to see if something awful might be about to happen to him, a doorway, threshold, or liminal space might well be a bottomless pit of annihilating terror, or somedays it may just flicker and hover before the vision suspiciously a moment...before the ground comes out altogether. Deleuze, as we have noted above, connects the "decisions of the spirit" to "modes of construction of space." The construction of space, always an arrangement of extremely novel fragments, invariably calls to mind doorways, passageways, and thresholds, at least as far as concerns the major films of Robert Bresson, from about the time of Un condamné à mort s'est échappé in '56—his first perfect film!—to 1983 and L'argent, his final film, the quantum physics update of an old Tolstoy story about a forged bill of tender and the total incomprehensible hell it unleashes. Robert Bresson never called the four films he made between 1951 and 1962 a 'prison cycle.' Other folks did that for him. Still, aside from the doors and thresholds et al., the "construction of space" in Bresson has very frequently been a matter of building prisons [or buildings as prisons] and efforts of various kinds, however inept or hapless, toward individual "unjailing" [to appropriate a lovely expression of Dot Jaggers', she the literary creation of the great Paul West.]
A DOOR IS NOT JUST A DOOR
Let us take note of the phenomenology of threshold, as encapsulated in the brilliant opening of a short story by the great Patricia Highsmith, admiring also the perhaps crypto-Bressonian title, "I Despise Your Life": "A hole is a hole is a hole, Ralph was thinking as he stared at the keyhole. The key was in his hand, ready to stick in, but still he hesitated. He could just as well ring the doorbell! He was expected."
AND WHAT IS THERE OUT THERE NOT CAPABLE OF IMPRISONING?
Two kinds of greater presiding sequence in the cinema of Robert Bresson: 1) Sequence and Sequencing of Prisons; 2) Sequence and Sequencing of Suicides.
Considered as narrative complexes and narrative systems, Un condamné à mort s'est échappé, Pickpocket, Procès de Jeanne d'Arc, and L'argent appear to completely hinge on prisons, whereas Mouchette, Une femme douce, and Le diable probablement hinge on suicide. If you are emotionally primed to get it, you invariably do: these are movies about people who condemn in no uncertain terms and want out of whatever they're in. Charles of Le diable probablement doesn't even want to die! Even Hamlet's Great Solipsistic Question is too stupid for him to countenance!! The first two Robert Bresson films I saw and fell in love with as a teenager were Un condamné à mort s'est échappé and Le diable probablement, a fact which we may well imagine explains my natural tendency to want to read the oeuvre transversally, across a dividing line incarnated out of habit and its ferric dust; the discourse, the dreck, the wreck. Let us please kind of look at a basic overview. We have seen no elevation to the Kingdom of God in the cinema of Robert Bresson, but there have been endless prospective fliers and their innumerable little and less-little attempts to fly or flee. Escape from prison and suicide in the cinema of Robert Bresson, just as is the case in the world I share today with all manner of phenomena, earn their equivalence in the general laboratory of going concerns. If the title of Le diable probablement doesn't tell us the end of the movie the way Un condamné à mort s'est échappé does, we don't have to wait long; the grim denouement is dished at the outset in a newspaper mock-up complete with unambiguous headline and photograph of our handsome and we now know very dead protagonist-antagonist. Equivalence, I'm telling you! What's the difference between Fontaine and Jost escaping from Nazi confinement and Charles paying his humourless and stupid junky acquaintance to shoot him dead in Pere Lachaise cemetery? Fontaine is still semi-fucked; Charles would appear to be at rest. That is an emotional truth [no be all, no end all], like it or not. Because of the order in which I first came to the two films, I was immediately going to notice how the discreet but very specific shot of Charles and his amigo pistola hopping down from the retaining wall into Pere Lachaise unquestionably echoes the final sequences of Un condamné à mort, nor that in both movies, the sequencing having slid into a bit of turbulence, the abyssal horrors of some dumb eternity are addressed head-on with the not-inconsiderable consolations of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, not known to make any other kind of sense to most folks other than that which is [or those that are] felt.
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